It never quite went off tonight. The clouds were perfectly set, but too much scud rolled in before the sun got below the clouds. I was worried about that, so I went to my spot underneath the bridge, hoping the extra mile inland would help. At first it looked like it was going to be great, as you can see in the first photo. But it wasn’t enough. The clouds kept rolling in and. I held hope as the sky started going light and for about a minute there was a lovely reflection and some lit clouds, but then the vibrancy died off and it was just a spot of glow and grey.
Alas, at the same time, the east was lit up with spectacular pink and purple. But, being beneath the bridge with all the water to the west of me, that did me no good. The last photo is what’s behind me at this spot, a bridge, a freeway offramp, and some bushes. Far less dramatic than still, reflecting waters.
Might have been a good night to take this lagoon from the other direction. I should scout the overlooks up the road. I’ve avoided them because the background is a mall and a wal mart, but maybe there’s some creative framing to be done for evenings like this.
We had an Exmas visitor today. This is a Red Shouldered Hawk. They’re smaller than the Red Tailed Hawks we normally see around here, though they feed on the same things.
Unfortunately, I was standing in the street taking these pictures and a car came just as he saw some pray and swooped off the perch, so I didn’t get it. And I mean just as it happened. The car came up beside me, I stepped aside, looked up and he was swooping down after something in the neighbor’s yard. So I didn’t get the money shot, but it’s still a handsome bird.
Lots of clouds, lots of wind. Offshore wind, though, which is very strange with these clouds. I never got the perfect light I was looking for, with some clouds and smoke obscuring the horizon, but a half hour after sunset taking 15-30 second exposures was kind of interesting.
I’ll just dump them all here. They should be in chronological order.
100 speed is too slow for surfers. At least during the winter sunset. I’ve got some Portra 400 and 800 coming, and I’ll likely try the same shots again if I get another day like this.
I also took a hard to meter shot into the sun. Portra is a little nicer on highlights, but Ektar does have some pretty significant dynamic range. I was able to pull some detail out of the jetty, which is well underexposed, and it doesn’t have the greenish tint the underexposed Portra gets.
What I really need is a big enough filter holder for these ginormous lenses so I don’t have to hold a GND with my free hand, hoping not to get a thumb or finger in the frame, to get the bright sky tamed.
The Black Phoebe was out again, trying to roust the mockingbird who has taken residence in the berry bush. He’d land on the wire and cheep cheep cheep loudly, then the mockingbird would hop on the fence above the berry bush and scare him off.
I have noticed the male mockingbird has picked up finch sounds, as well. Except not the sound of a finch, he makes the sound of a bunch of them arguing and chattering at each other. Makes it harder for me to locate the actual finches, which I pretty much do by ear.
I was also able to catch this hummeringbird feeding off the cactus flowers and then resting on the wire above. I’ve been trying to get one feeding in the wild for a long time, so I am happy I was able to get a reasonable shot.
And targets of opportunity, a female house finch posing on the wire after the hummingbird left, and some bees in flight.
House finch, Mockingbird, Black Phoebe — which, in addition to being a bird sounds like a good song title. I should take pictures of this dude to put on the album cover.
And from last night when it was cloudy, another mockingbird shot. This one has been following that black phoebe around and and now emulates it’s call perfectly.
Bees were swarming around the cactus flowers in the front yard. I got a wild hair to try and catch one in flight, but I had scant success. Wrong lens, and it was very late in the evening so the light didn’t last long enough for me to run inside and grab one more appropriate.
I did get to delete 300 photographs and only keep 8 or 10 though. So I have that going for me, which is nice.
I got two static photos that I like, though. One of a bee, one of a ladybug. And the neighbors staring at me like I was strange for standing in a bee swarm with my camera 8 inches from the cactus is a good trade for two OK shots.
Just a few shots I took looking for challenging metering. I pretty much lost half of each roll doing this, but I think I am learning some. Taken over the course of a week in Early December. I’ll just leave them here without further comment.
This afternoon there was a lovely, broken, high cirrus with no scud on the horizon and little possibility of the marine layer blocking a glorious lighting of the high clouds. It was going to be a perfect sunset for photography.
I put the ultrawide on the film camera, and camped on a spot where I saw several strings of pelicans flying by at low altitude, and where I expected plenty of options for subjects beneath the spectacular glow. Then I watched the sky as the clouds dissipated, leaving me with nothing above the horizon. Instead of a firmament of ping, purple, and yellow I got mostly blue, with the only color being right where the sun hit the horizon. And the pelicans never again flew past. That’ll teach me to get excited for the weather.
At least I had the digital with a 24-70 lens, so I spent some of the time experimenting with powerful backlighting. The tide was extremely low and the breeze was out of the north. Plenty of seagulls were using the jetties for lift, at some moments congregating in groups a dozen strong, and I got a few cormorants heading north for variety. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but at least it was a fun way to spend an hour outside on a chilly evening.
I dumped a smattering of the images to jpeg and I’ll just leave them here.
I have been burning through some film stock, trying to see what’s what in negative film. The recent tests have been on Portra 160, Ektar, and PanF 50.
I originally thought to just try one black and white and one color film, and chose Ektar and Ilford XP2 to start with. The Ilford was chosen at random as a 400 speed black and white that has been around forever, so I figured it was a standard. The Ektar because I saw some great landscape images on the website of a photographer I like1. Both are reputed to be forgiving, so I got a box of each.
But I ended up with a large variety before I even shot my first frame. The gentleman I bought the camera from said he’d toss in a “couple rolls of film to get me started,” which I thought was awesome. But his definition of “couple” was quite expansive. He actually gave me a two boxes of Portra 160 as well as a bunch of Ilford black and white including PanF 50, Delta 100, and Delta 3200. Quite a variety!
Ektar is supposedly the more saturated negative film, and I’d thought to do some saturated landscapes when I decided to try film. The first rolls I shot that came out showed that it is, in fact, super saturated. Enough that skin tones get a little ruddy and golden sunlight gets a touch of red in it. The roll I got back today, however, was shot into a sunset with wild colors reflecting on calm water and it was beautiful.
This shot was the last frame of Ektar I had — I took three shots, the other two as lovely but I like the ducks in this one. I shot Portra before this for comparison, and was about ready to pack up and head back to the truck, but this was a sunset that never wanted to give up and a few minutes after I ran out of Ektar every cloud lit up an amazing pink, and even the ones overhead were reflected on the still water in front of me, so I slapped on the back with Portra 160 and gave it a go.
In all cases I knew the reeds in the middle were going to go black. The sky and the water only had a stop or two difference, but the reeds were several stops down, so I metered for the water and let the sky take care of itself. From what I’ve sussed about these films, you can go down a stop or two then it gets noisy, then black. You can go up way more and the highlights won’t run out of information even if they’re four stops over.
Well, the Portra definitely fits that bill. It’s amazeballs, and even the reeds in the foreground, which are down two stops, show the weird pink glow everything had in real life. The second shot is a four or eight second exposure3 and I can’t tell you how happy I am it came out like this.
Another roll of Portra had some night shots I’d done the week after Thanksgiving, including shots of Baba. The less saturated colors are even more pleasing than the slightly over-the-top Ektar shot of the same scene, and the dynamic range is beyond impressive.
Baba Coffee — shot on Portra 160Baba Coffee — shot on Ektar 100
The same shot in Ektar is also lovely, but I’m a fan of the Portra. The colors are spot on, and the dynamic range is even better than the Ektar, which already handles the lit sign better than digital by far. Note how much more influence the streetlamp has on the color cast on Ektar as well, coming up a little green, but also note how much extra blue it adds to the sign and the umbrellas.
Even though I metered the same way, the Portra shot might be slightly more exposed. It is 160 speed film, compared to Ektar’s 100 speed, and having come only a few minutes later in the evening I’m guessing it wasn’t a whole stop darker even though I corrected up a full stop, but the highlights are still beautifully handled. The information in the dark areas is lovely, too, and you can tell the building above is a deep ruddy brown.
As for the PanF 50, I don’t know what to make of it. Every single image I took the camera barked at me4, even when I thought I was doubling the meter reading. I’ve learned two things here, first that PanF has a lot of reciprocity failure and needs quite a bit more than the meter says, and second, that the Fuji really doesn’t measure well at ASA50 so sometimes you just have to let it beep at you and tell it to suck your balls. Both of these shots were called underexposed and, though not exactly perfect, were not so dark I’d expect them to be more than two stops down.
I also took some experimental artsy5 shots of some bridge pilings where I had deep shadows and brightly lit concrete. All three had the camera beeping and flashing lights like a pissed off R2D2, yet I’m not convinced that they are too dark. The darkest one is underexposed, sure. But at very least least the brightest one has to be within two stops of adequate, regardless of the disapproving minus sign.
That said, I printed out a reciprocity chart for Ilford films and tossed a copy in each of my camera and gear bags. 50 speed film is slow even in full daylight, and the failure on these black and whites is way more than I realized. 4 seconds on the meter translates to over 7 seconds in the real world, and it gets worse from there so this stuff isn’t just meter for the shadows. It’s meter for the shadows then double it.
This was a fun bunch of data. Not in the least because I am still very uncertain about how to meter for a lot of situations and having a few frames come back nice, not just recoverable, is quite a relief.
The next batch will be both better and worse. I tried some crazy long exposures, which I’m almost certain won’t be good but will give me data on how far off my assumptions are. And I shot some tonight that included a spectacular sky and some pretty reasonable subjects, so I’m confident the incident metering in conjunction with Portra’s dynamic range should give me a usable shot or two.
1. alexburkephoto.com — I don’t know the cat, he just posts beautiful landscapes and explains things like metering and filters in a way that I find very easy to understand.
2. After carefully exposing several shots, bracketing the meter, and recording my settings for test purposes, I pulled this roll out of the camera and dropped it, at which point it sprung open and ruined the whole roll. I now keep a rubber band in my pocket to put on exposed film and keep it from unrolling, just in case.
3. It was very dark and I had put my notepad away already, so I don’t remember exactly. Which is foolish, as the whole reason for this was to test film and practice exposure in challenging conditions.
4. Being state of the art in 1997, this camera does metering through the lens. But only while you’re taking the picture, not before hand. If it doesn’t think it got enough light, or got too much light, during your exposure it will beep annoyingly and flash all the LCD screens in a fit of disapproval. Strangely, it makes it extra satisfying when it doesn’t beep and the “EXP” is shown on the screen instead of the flashing lights and a + or – sign showing that you over or underexposed that last shot.
5. This just means they’re crap shots. But if you act like they’re great art filled with hidden meaning and anyone who doesn’t understand them just doesn’t get it, maybe you’re avant-garde.
